In the world of interconnected devices, fast internet connectivity is so basic that users, by default, are sensitive to subpar speeds and connectivity drops. But it doesn’t matter whether your service provider is the best in town, or if you have the finest-quality wires, Wi-Fi problems are inescapable.
At the recent Mobility Field Day event, Wyebot presented the Wyebot Wi-Fi automation platform. Designed to provide problem-free Wi-Fi for business, Wyebot takes out the operational stress and paves the path to Wi-Fi assurance. Anil Gupta, CTO, gave a quick refresher of the platform, and detailed some of its latest features to the audience.
Monitoring the Wi-Fi Environment to Avert Connectivity Issues
Delivering uninterrupted internet service within the office square footage is a bigger burden than most assume. Often performance and stability issues creep up making connectivity erratic and unreliable. The problems snowball as the network becomes more complex with the addition of more clients and bandwidth-intensive applications.
A proven method to resolve intermittent Wi-Fi issues is to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot through remote monitoring. Keeping an eye on all the components and aspects of the network tells operators when thresholds need tuning, what problems are number one priority, and which alerts are false positives. In short, it provides constant intelligence that tells how issue can be resolved, and performance can be enhanced. This greatly reduces interference and overall ensures steady speeds.
A Stunningly Simply Solution
For Wyebot, an enterprise-ready wireless network is one that provides exceptional data rates and is able to meet the demands of the organization. That comes from the ability to connect, monitor and control the network. With operational complexity nearly doubled in just a few years, network monitoring can be both very stressful and cumbersome.
Wyebot’s intelligence platform makes this inelegant job a breeze. “We know that there are competing solutions when it comes to overlay Wi-Fi assurance platforms, but what makes Wyebot so unique is the approach that we took,” said Gupta.
The platform features three core components – the Wyebot intelligent sensors, Wyebot Cloud and the Wyebot Dashboard.
Wyebot sensors are easy, plug-and-play devices that provide real-time monitoring. Each sensor is fitted with a set of Wi-Fi radios, two of which are passive with zero transmitting capabilities. The work of these radios is to move with the APs and capture packets 24/7.
“As the access point changes channel, these radios will automatically change channels. You can set them to track an SSID or a BSSID. For those who are interested in pure packet captures, this is an excellent tool and is unique in the industry in terms of providing a full packet capture,” highlights Gupta.
These radios only do packet capture, and come with on-board storage where data can be saved for 1 to 4 days. The packet size can be just headers or full packets.
Additionally, Wyebot provides users the flexibility to extend the storage with a 128GB USB drive that it provides. “We did a lot of study on writing packets quickly to USB storage, the read and write capacity, the mean time between failures (MTBF). We chose a USB adapter that has our own micro-SD card. It is industry-grade and capable of a million reads and writes,” informs Gupta.
Wyebot does not decrypt packets. Data is streamed to cloud on demand and is made available to download through the dashboard.
The third is an Intel radio which is a multi-purpose device used for packet captures, Wi-Fi backhaul as well as synthetic network testing.
As the sensors collect Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi data from disparate sources, they send it over to the cloud through a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) tunnel. In the cloud, the analytical work happens. Data is parsed for behavioral profiling, pattern recognition, client detection, fingerprinting and so on. The Wyebot Dashboard sends out the information through reports and alerts.
When it comes to ease of use, very few products hold a candle to Wyebot. “We designed the product from ground up to be very very simple to use,” assured Gupta.
The sensors require no manual configuration. They auto-configure and are ready to go. “Even through the cloud, there isn’t much of per-sensor configuration because the only thing we ask our customers when they want to use the sensor for synthetic network testing is the credentials of their network,” says Gupta.
Latest on Wyebot
This year Wyebot rolled out two new versions. v4.1 and 4.2 released in June and Sept and comes with a breadth of new enhancements. For example, in the new versions, users can tweak the notification system by creating a profile and trigger criteria to get custom alerts for specific events. Multiple users can be added to one such profile.
Wyebot is set to roll out v4.3 this quarter. In this version, Wyebot has added more enhancements based on customer requests. These include disabling the LAN port flapping during network tests, supporting any sensor to be selected as iPerf server, adding API key status for Meraki and more.
In order to expand the ecosystem, Wyebot has struck partnership with two of the industry’s biggest brands – Cisco Meraki and Intel. Gupta told that Wyebot is now officially in the Meraki Marketplace. Through the partnership, Wyebot is able to interface with the Meraki API and gather data from the Meraki infrastructure.
With Intel, it can now collect exclusive telemetry information like roaming reasons, beacon miss counts, data rates histogram, detailed scan data, and transmit attempts info from Intel drivers through the soon to release Wyebot Sensor PC Service. It is a lightweight client application deigned to run on Windows platform. Running as a background service, it gathers intelligence from Intel applications and passes it to Wyebot Cloud.
The dashboard, Gupta told, is very similar to the Wyebot sensor dashboard. The application can run a series of network tests including application testing, voice and video testing, and trace route, both on demand and on schedule.
The Wyebot platform is consumed as a subscription service. Wyebot does all the hardware maintenance from repair to update, replacement and more. “You do not have to worry about it. You are eligible for the software and hardware upgrades, software support – everything is included in that one subscription,” said Gupta.
To learn more, be sure to check out Wyebot’s detailed presentation from the recent Mobility Field Day event.
